My Life as a Cat by Miranda Collinge

my life as a cat began one evening when I was in my early twenties. I was a student and had signed up to a catering agency that considered itself at the fancier end of things. They spotted my Sloaney first name, ignored my grumpy Northern surname, and invited me in for training. In an office block in Putney, they taught me how to do that thing where you carry several plates up your arm, which I still occasionally dust off at dinner time, and that other thing where you pick up peas with a spoon and a fork in the same hand, which I do not. I learned how to correctly deposit a dish (“loaf on the left”) and remove it (“rubbish from the right”), so that I could safely be trusted not to come at posh people with a bread roll from an unforeseen direction.

I’m not sure if it was clear from the training that I was less clubbable than expected — was there a two-way mirror somewhere in the room, behind which a Rupert and a Vanessa noted on clipboards my mousey-brown hair? The tell-tale downturn of my mouth at the corners? — but for whatever reason, the jobs did not come rolling in. After several months, the highlight of my catering experiencing had been serving a single miniature hot dog to Anneka Rice, who looked me in the eye as she thanked me, and for whom there will be a special place in my heart. I also served one to David Coulthard. I was therefore surprised to get a call one afternoon asking if I could work at a dinner for a well-known sportsman that would be happening that same night. I headed for the tube.

I arrived at the venue — a fancy but tired London hotel — sweating into the black top and skirt I had been told to wear and looking for somewhere to change into the high heels I’d been instructed to bring. I was led to a back room where, upon opening the door, the reality of the enterprise was made clear. In front of me was a sea of pretty girls, all slim-hipped and flippy-haired, and one other blonde who was

conspicuously heavier set than the rest. “Did they call you today?” she asked me, cheerily. I surveyed the room and nodded.

“Here,” said a dark-haired girl with a mouth like a peony in bloom, pointing to a table, “you need these.” Laid out in front of us were piles of black cat ears, bow ties and clip-on tails.

In 1963, the journalist, and later, feminist activist, Gloria Steinem famously spent a month undercover as a Playboy Bunny in New York. It was at the suggestion of her editors at Show magazine (“Who were all guys, of course,” she told Ronan Farrow in an interview in 2020). Steinem created an alias, Marie Ochs, and despite being four years older than the upper age limit of 24, sailed through the entry requirements for the job, which included — unbelievably — an internal physical exam. The piece ran as diary entries detailing the everyday life of a Bunny: the costume so tight it left marks on their bodies, the three-inch heels that made their feet permanently swell, the pay cheques that fell far short of the promises, the tail-tweaks and lame propositions from drunk men that came in an endless surge.

Sadly, I had not read Gloria Steinem on the day I became a cat, so did not know that I was doing something with the potential to be subversive. I was just trying to get paid, and vaguely do the job that was being asked of us. This turned out to be waiting for the dinner — and more pertinently the drinks — to be consumed before stationing ourselves between the tables and selling raffle tickets at exorbitant prices to the guests (also all guys, of course). I watched from the wings as a well-known comedian told his offcolour jokes to brays and guffaws from the ballroom, and nervously twitched my tail.

Then we were up. A line of nubile felines slinked across the floor to the hooting delight of the crowd, fanning their raffle ticket books above their heads like the cigarette girl chorus parading out of the tobacco factory in Carmen. I watched in horror as the cats in front of me began to rub themselves against the back of the gold-painted chairs and paw playfully at £50 notes wafted just beyond their reach. Surely I was not expected to do the same?

With a jolt I understood. No! These were not cats! These were kittens. To my right, the bigboned girl, my fellow super-sub, had gone rogue and was enacting the full Labrador, rolling about on a man’s lap with lolloping abandon. If there was one thing I was going to do, I told myself, it was stick to the brief.

I was directed to a spot in the middle of the carpet between four tables and stood as far away from all of them as I could manage. I turned my gaze to the chandelier that loomed above us like a mushroom cloud. “Raffle tickets, raffle tickets…” I wailed apologetically, with the tuneless yowl of an alley cat standing on a bin lid. Like an alley cat on a bin lid, I was studiously ignored.

Many minutes passed. It felt like hours. I did not sell a single ticket. I felt increasingly panicked, and humiliated, but I also knew that a cat never lets on. It was nonchalance or die. I closed my eyes and pretended to be napping. I traced patterns in the carpet with my toe. Had I possessed the crural dexterity to stretch a leg out behind my head and casually lick my bumhole I might have done so, were there not a risk of it going down a little too well. I did not make eye contact.

Eventually, it was time for the kittens to withdraw. Here they came, clutching fistfuls of money and their eviscerated raffle ticket books. My own was still in my hand, resolutely unmolested. A man at one of “my” tables called me over, asked me how much I needed to make on the tickets. He fished a wad of notes out of his pocket. He did not try to stroke my ears or pinch my tail. I dropped the raffle tickets onto the table with the ceremonial solemnity of a Siamese presenting a mouse’s head. I was, I had to admit, though not to him, supremely grateful.

After her piece was published, Gloria Steinem received a three-page letter from Hugh Hefner, in which he agreed to eliminate the physical exam from the Bunny interview process. She was also sued. She has spoken for years about the difficulty she had in getting people to take her seriously because of the article, despite the shock waves it caused and the trailblazing path it set her on. In a 1995 postscript to her original piece, included alongside it in the second edition of her 1983 essay collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, she wrote that one of the longer-term results of doing it was the realisation “that all women are Bunnies”. No, Gloria, not all of us.

I had no big plans to expose the abject sexual discrimination at the heart of Western society. I was far too lazy for that. But over time I began to think that one day, maybe, I could sneak a couple of paragraphs about Gloria Steinem into a magazine that contains lots of pictures of trousers (one of her breakthrough assignments, it should be noted, was a 1962 article about contraception for Esquire). That seemed like the kind of low-level subterfuge thing I could manage, like doing a poo among the geraniums. On my way out of the hotel, I changed back out of my high heels and into my trainers. I took off the bow tie and put it on the table, but I kept the ears and the tail. I didn’t know why, but I just felt they might be useful. My evening as a cat was over. My life as a cat had begun.

○